According to the FT, Europe's gas imports from Russia once again overtook supplies from the US for the first time in almost two years in May, despite the region's efforts to wean itself off Russian fossil fuels since the full scale invasion of Ukraine.
"It's striking to see the market share of Russian gas and inch higher in Europe after all we have been through, and all the efforts made to decouple and de-risk energy supply," said Tom Marzec-Manser, head of gas analytics at consultancy ICIS. Actually it's not, and it shows that for all the rhetoric and posturing, nothing has changed in Europe and Moscow still looms large as an anchor source of European energy.
Following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Moscow slashed its pipeline gas supplies to Europe and the region stepped up imports of LNG, which is shipped on specialized vessels with the US as a major provider.
Sure enough, a few months later in September 2022, the US overtook Russia as a supplier of gas to Europe and has since 2023 accounted for about a fifth of the region's supply.
As the FT notes, Russia stopped sending gas through pipelines connecting it to north-west Europe in mid-2022, but continues to provide supplies via pipelines through Ukraine and Turkey.
The European Commission is supporting efforts to establish an investment plan to expand the capacity of pipelines in the Southern Gas Corridor between the EU and Azerbaijan, but a senior EU official said supplies through the route were not currently sufficient to replace the 14bn cubic metres of Russian gas that currently flowed through Ukraine to the EU each year.
"Our gas storage remains at record high levels [and] our gas demand stabilised at record low levels, down 20% compared with 2021." And, it turns out, Europe has Russia to thank for its record high gas storage.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/russia-overtakes-us-gas-supplier-europe
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